Social media

Did you know consumers now use their mobile devices in 45% of all shopping trips? It’s no secret that mobile use has changed the way we market to consumers, and Facebook has changed the game when it comes to mobile marketing. Just this morning, Facebook announced new ways for businesses to drive consumers to their brick-and-mortar stores, measure those visits, and tie in-store sales to Facebook ad campaigns.

First up: Getting people to your business. You can do this by creating local awareness ads, either online or through the mobile Facebook Pages app. These ads have been around for a while, but new to Facebook is a native store locator, which is incorporated into them. Without leaving the mobile ad, people can see details about your business, view an address and map of stores near them, and can even get an estimated travel times.

Next: Measuring store visits. Until now, it’s been tough to measure the actual impact a Facebook ad has in generating traffic to your place of business. In their newest update, Facebook has added “store visits,” a new ads metric that allows advertisers to see the number of new in-store visitors as a result of local awareness ads, adjust ad settings based on those store visits, and analyze results across all business locations and regions for future ad campaign planning. This feature uses information shared by people who have location services enabled on their phones.

And last but not least: Tying in-store sales to Facebook ads. With the new “Offline Conversions API,” businesses can compare transaction data to the reported ad results in the Facebook dashboard. This enables businesses to see real-time results of their marketing campaigns, gain insights into their customer demographics, and helps them improve their targeting efforts for future campaigns. This tool hasn’t been rolled out to all businesses quite yet. It will require partnering with point-of-sale system providers like IBM, Marketo and Square, among others, to be most beneficial.

These new features should be available to all businesses within the next month or so.

Find out how we can help optimize your Facebook marketing efforts and drive sales by getting in touch with Tabitha Weaver: tabitha@vardeman.com.